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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
D.A. Carson
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April 3 - April 4, 2018
What Paul avoided was artificial communication that won plaudits for the speaker but distracted from the message.
Rather, they warn against any method that leads people to say, “What a marvelous preacher!” rather than, “What a marvelous Savior!”
Proclaim the testimony about God.
God is not negotiating; he is both announcing and confronting.
It is not arrogant to represent as forcefully as we can God’s gospel; it is simply faithful stewardship.
Focus on Christ crucified.
No, what he means is that all he does and teaches is tied to the cross.
Do not fear weakness, illness, or a sense of being overwhelmed. The truth of the matter is that such experiences are often the occasions when God most greatly displays his power.
Although he suffered fears, illness, weakness, and a tremendous sense of being overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, he did not fear the fear;
Strenuously avoid manipulating people.
It is the truth and power of the gospel that must change people’s lives, not the glamour of our oratory or the emotional power of our stories.
Recognize that a cross-centered ministry is characterized by the Spirit’s power and is vindicated in
transformed lives.
The message of the cross smashes the great idolatries of the ecclesiastical world: our endless self-promotion, our love of mere professionalism, our addiction to well-defined methods.
Biblical preaching emphasizes the gospel and constantly elevates Christ crucified.
The rulers themselves “are coming to nothing” (2:6). Why then should Christians be infatuated with paper heroes who win the passing applause of a dying world, but who from an eternal perspective are without significance?
This “wisdom,” the wisdom of the cross, is characterized by three things. First, it is, literally, “wisdom in a mystery,” what the New International Version calls “God’s wisdom” (2:7).
So the “message of wisdom,” the message of the cross that we proclaim, is “God’s secret wisdom,” a wisdom that was in large measure hidden for long ages until the Messiah was crucified.
They thought they were doing away with a messianic pretender; in fact, they were illegally and immorally executing “the Lord of glory.” They thought they were so wise, so politically astute; in fact, by their folly they brought to pass, in God’s perfect providence, his own wise plan—the very plan that they dismissed as foolishness.
Paul concludes his point by citing Scripture, apparently an amalgam from Isaiah 64:4 and 65:17 in the Greek Old Testament he was using. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (2:9).
Paul uses these words to refer to what has been hidden in the past but is now revealed to believers.
If we “see” the truth of the gospel, therefore, it has nothing to do with our brilliance or insight; it has to do with the Spirit of God.
The words “what God has freely given us” refer to the cross of the Messiah and all that he has achieved for us.
What a great God we have! Not only does he redeem us through the ignominious crucifixion of his much-loved Son, but he sends us his Spirit to enable us to understand what he has done.
In his ministry, Paul, prompted by the Spirit, found himself explaining spiritual things (the message of the cross, brought home to people by the Spirit, v. 12) in spiritual words—that is, in words appropriate to the nature of the message.
Above all, then, Paul focuses on the message of the cross. The spirit of the world cannot make sense of it; the Spirit of God enables those who have this Spirit to understand it. That same Spirit prompts the spiritually-minded, like Paul, to preach it and teach it in appropriate ways.
Christians in contemporary Western society are constantly being told that they are ignorant, narrow, and incapable of understanding the real world. Paul says the opposite: Christians are as capable as other sinners of understanding the complex and interwoven nature of sin, of grasping the ways in which
“wannabe” autonomous human beings reason, and of explaining what the world looks like to modern pagans in our post-modern world. But because they have received the Spirit of God, they are also capable of saying something wise and true about the way the world appears to God.
From this perspective, it is idiotic—that is not too strong a word—to extol the world’s perspective and secretly lust after its limited vision.
We must recognize that what it means to be wise, what it means to be spiritual, is to embrace, by the help of God’s Spirit, the message of the crucified Messiah.
What Paul says, then, is that our self-centeredness, our sin, is so deep that we cannot truly see the cross for what it is, apart from the work of the Spirit.
Paul’s point is that truly grasping the truth of the cross and being transformed cannot be separated—and both are utterly dependent on the work of the Spirit.
Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple,
This chapter, 1 Corinthians 3, is part of one sustained argument that runs from 1:10 to 4:21. Primarily, Paul addresses the deep divisiveness, the wretched factionalism, that plagues the church at Corinth.
As long as some Christians are saying, “I am of Paul [or Apollos, or Cephas, or Wesley, or Calvin],” making some Christian leader the prime point of their identification, they do not truly grasp the nature of Christian leadership. Clearing up these misapprehensions is what largely occupies the apostle in 1 Corinthians 3–4.
he discovered he could not address the Corinthians “as spiritual” (that is, as people with the Spirit) but would have to speak with them as “fleshly” (that is, as people without the Spirit).
At some point the number of years they have been Christians leads you to expect something like mature behavior from them, but they prove disappointing. They are infants still and display their wretched immaturity even in the way that they complain if you give them more than milk.
Paul has behaved not in line with the “wisdom” that reflects the point of view of sinful human nature, but in line with
God’s grace.
The Corinthian believers display “jealousy and quarreling” (3:3). As long as they manifest such sins, they are worldly (sarkikos), exhibiting what is characteristic of fallen human nature. They are “acting like mere men” (3:3), that is, as if they did not have the Spirit. (2)
Christian leaders are, in the first place, “only servants.”
In this context, Paul does not mean “servants of the church,” but “servants of Jesus Christ,” for here it is the Lord who “has assigned to each his task.”
Clearly, as far as Paul is concerned, to be a servant of Jesus Christ and to be one of God’s workers amounts to the same thing.
The field represents the Corinthians, and it belongs to God (“you are God’s field,” 3:9); the workers in the field are people like Paul and Apollos, and they belong to God (“we are God’s fellow workers,” 3:9). God owns the field and the workers; he assigns the workers their task, and he alone makes the seed grow.
Christian leaders are only servants of Christ and are not to be accorded allegiance that is reserved for God alone.
Once again a distinction is maintained between the “ordinary” believers and the leaders. Here the believers are “God’s building”; the leaders are the builders.
Jesus Christ himself becomes the foundation that Paul laid (3:11). God is not specifically mentioned in verses11 through 15, but he stands behind the judgment implicit in “the Day” and “the fire” that will reveal the quality of each builder’s work. In other words, God owns the building, and he judges the quality of the work of each builder.
11). If what is being built is the church of God, the only possible foundation is Jesus Christ, or, more fully, “Jesus Christ and him crucified,” to use the expression of 2:2.
Rather, he distinguishes between only two kinds of building materials: the kind that cannot withstand the fire that “will test the quality of each man’s work” on “the Day” when each builder’s work “will be shown for what it is” (3:13), and the kind that survives.
First, those who “suffer loss” but who escape “through the flames” are not the “carnal” or “worldly” Christians of 3:1–4 but are Christian leaders who build the church with materials that will not withstand the final conflagration.
